The Tenants Satisfaction Survey 2006
The 2006 Lambeth Tenant survey (TSS) is helping us to provide better services. The survey provides valuable information about your household, where you live and what you think about housing services.
Lambeth believes consultation with tenants is important to continued improvement of appropriate services. What you told us is already being used to influence the development and improvement of services you rely on.
The survey
In August 2006 738 tenants from the randomly selected proportion replied to the survey that Lambeth commissioned. Market Research Company Ipsos MORI carried out the research in order that Lambeth meet the government stipulation that a TSS be carried out at least every three years by every local authority.
The results
Facts about Lambeth tenants
- Number of tenancies: 27,140
- Average length of time as a tenant: 12.5 years
- Single person households: 47%
- Tenants with a longstanding illness or disability: 50%
Overall satisfaction
The survey provides us with the data to produce two key housing performance indicators:
- BVPI74 - the indicator for overall satisfaction with the landlord
- BVPI75 - the opportunity for tenants to participate in management and decision making
Satisfaction has gone up on both these indicators for the third survey in a row. We are pleased to say that our rate of improvement as a landlord – five percent - is significant when compared with other London boroughs. Meanwhile for tenant participation, the improvement was just two percent, leaving lots of room for progress in this area.
Your priorites
We need to know what aspects of our service are most important to you and what you want us to concentrate on in terms of improvements. Your top priorities were:
- repairs and maintenance
- the overall quality of your home
- value for money
Where are we improving?
Notable areas of improvement between 2004 and 2006:
| |
2004 |
2006 |
Change |
| Repairs |
54% |
63% |
+9% |
| Overall landlord service |
57% |
62% |
+5% |
The repairs service shows the best rate of improvement. But tenants want more of a good thing and it is an area you identified for more improvement.
The overall landlord service shows a continuing improvement trend.
Room for improvement
Areas of satisfaction showing a decrease between 2004 and 2006:
| |
2004 |
2006 |
Change |
Final outcome of contacting
landlord about a service issue |
54% |
50% |
-4% |
| Condition of property |
57% |
55% |
-2% |
The final outcome of an enquiry is an area of service we will be looking at closely. This includes looking at the monitoring of our service centres and using mystery shopping to do spot checking.
You have told us that the condition of your home is of great importance to you. We are currently addressing this through our capital works programme and in particular through the Decent Homes Standard works.
Repairs
Satisfaction with the repairs service showed the biggest rise compared with all other satisfaction measures.
| |
2004 |
2006 |
Change |
| Keeping dirt and mess to a minimum |
74% |
79% |
+5% |
| Overall quality of repair |
69% |
75% |
+6% |
| Attitude of workers |
83% |
85% |
+2% |
| Speed with which work was completed |
70% |
80% |
+10% |
| Time taken before work started |
62% |
72% |
+10% |
| Being told when workers will call |
74% |
80% |
+6% |
Customer services
Tenants were asked to comment on the service they received if they had made a service request in the last 12 months – 74% had done so.
Services requested by tenants
- Repairs: 66%
- Rent/ Housing benefit: 12%
- Transfer/Exchange: 8%
- Neighbours: 5%
- Other: 10%
Neighbourhood problems
The top three problems identified as a slight or serious problem were:
- 68% litter in the streets
- 65% vandalism
- 62% graffiti
Contact with you
The survey posed a number of questions about how you liked to communicate with the housing service or how you liked us to contact you.
We are good at keeping you informed, but we need to make more effort to engage tenants. It is interesting that over half of you prefer to contacted by phone, while a little over a third of you like to be written to keep you informed of housing information.